House of Cards
by armedwithanotepad
Summary: Weapons don't have feelings. The Soldier knows this. So he pushes, and the man falls. Oneshot.


_A/N: So I wrote a Winter Soldier piece. (That movie really was asking for it, though.) Basically, it's the Winter Soldier's thoughts as he pushes Steve out of the Helicarrier. Enjoy. _

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**House of Cards**

He pushes, and the man falls.

Falling, falling, flailing, like a bird out of the sky. No more wings to save him. The man does not even have his shield to cling to, not even that, ha, ha! He will fall and he will die. The Soldier has wounded him already. His blood will seep through his blue uniform into the blue water, spiralling, spiralling like ribbons in the air. Twirling and swirling. He will die from blood loss, from exhaustion, he will drown. The Soldier will have done his job. He will have completed his mission. He will go back to the people with the power and they will strap him to a chair, and he will forget.

But.

He cannot remember there ever being a 'but' before. He cannot remember much at all. That is why it jars him, this- this feeling that he gets when he sees the man. It is too mild to be sadness, but far too strong an emotion to be ignored. Far too strong an emotion for he, the Soldier, to have. He is a robot. Robots do not feel. He knows this.

But.

The man is there, a quiet exception to all that he remembers experiencing. He fails to respond the way a Target should. He fails to follow the patterns the Soldier has mapped out in his mind for his prey, because they always follow some pattern or another, like the rules of a card game, they always do.

But.

He doesn't. Why doesn't he?

Why doesn't he? It makes him angry.

No, not just angry, livid. He wants to scream at the man and punch him, throttle him, make him feel the pain, the jagged fragments of emotions that stab him, stab him, stab him. He wants to pierce the Target's flesh with cold metal, to watch his life bleed out onto the Soldier's hands. He wants to laugh while he's doing it. Laughing. Crying. Both. Both at once. Both and neither.

The Soldier doesn't cry. Tears are for the Targets, as they look into his soulless eyes and see their endings.

The Soldier doesn't really know what it is to laugh. At least, he can't remember doing it himself. He wonders if he can.

He scares him, the man, the Target. He scares him, because the Soldier isn't meant to feel these things. To feel anything, actually. And so that is why he felt glad when he pushed, and the man fell.

Is he still falling?

No. Yes. It doesn't matter. More than that, it shouldn't matter, because whether he is or not won't make a difference to the Soldier. The man is going to die, he is going to have died at the Soldier's hand, and another name will be ticked from the list, another mission complete. And as the name is erased so will the Soldier's memories be eradicated. He won't feel anymore. He won't want to feel. He will be himself again, the Soldier, a machine, a tool. A weapon. He will know his place in the world, and he will be grateful. The man deserves his fate, for making him like this, for digging up emotions that the Soldier thought were long gone. He has no right to remember, just as the man has no right to make him.

The people with the power don't like it, and so it is law. And he agrees. He is a weapon, like a gun or a tank or a bomb. A knife in the dark, a harbinger of death, doom, destruction. When you point a gun and shoot you don't care what it thinks. You don't worry about what it thinks. It doesn't think. It's better for everyone if the weapon doesn't think.

Isn't it?

Isn't it?

Yes. Yes it is. It is it is it is.

The man doesn't think he is a weapon.

No. Yes he does. Of course he does. If he doesn't then he's wrong. The people with the power would put him in the chair for that thought, and they would make him scream and squirm but they wouldn't kill him. Why? Because he is their weapon. They own him. When a gun doesn't fire properly you fix it, you fix it, especially when that's your best gun, the best gun anyone could have, actually. They own him, and they will fix him, make him new. He can endure the pain if it wipes him clean. So that proves it. Obviously. It proves it.

The man doesn't think he is a weapon.

But he is. He's wrong. The man thinks he's someone else, someone the man knew, probably someone he was friends with. The Soldier isn't that man. The Target is mistaken. The Soldier isn't actually a man at all, and certainly not the friend of a hero. Certainly not. Look at it rationally. If he was the friend of a hero he must have been good, once, if you think about it rationally. If he was the friend of a hero the man, the man in the blue and white and red, he would have kept him from harm. Heroes do not let their friends go. The Soldier knows this, from various missions he's completed. The people with the power allow him to know this because of the patterns. Targets follow patterns, at least to some degree.

Except this one.

He didn't fight back.

Why didn't he?

Why didn't he? There must be some reason for it, the Soldier must have overlooked it. He didn't fight back, not that it would have been much use to him anyway, but in the Soldier's experience all the Targets at least tried. They even warned him about this Target, that he was just as strong as the Soldier was, even though that seemed so implausible at the time, laughable even. But he hadn't even tried. And wasn't that what dying men were meant to do? Weren't they meant to fight it? Deny it. Cheat it, whatever. They don't go limp in their attackers arms and just- and just give up. And just refuse to live.

It doesn't make sense.

It might have been a strategy, that might have been it. If it was it worked, at least for a bit. For a few moments the Soldier had stopped punching, stopped making the man feel his pain and just withered underneath it. The man said words that ripped his mind to shreds and scattered the pieces, leaving him scrambling to find some sense, some familiar aspect of himself. The man said words that tried to rebuild the solider into the hero's friend, that tried to change him, that tried to make him remember forbidden things.

His mind hurts. His heart hurts, which is stupid, because he doesn't have a heart, at least not in that sense. The man has blown a card over in the house of cards his mind is and it has all come tumbling down.

Tumbling down. Tumbling down, down, like the man is now.

Like the man is now.

Like

the

man

is

now

He will be dead very soon, if he is not already.

The Soldier doesn't know how he feels about that.

The Soldier doesn't know why it matters how he feels about that.

And yet it matters to him.

The man is falling.

The Soldier pushed him.

The man is falling.

The Soldier feels something. Someone else might have called it helplessness. It is foreign to him, and yet he gets the feeling that it shouldn't be.

The man is falling.

The Soldier gets up from where he is sitting. The Soldier removes his hands, the perfect illustration of the Frankenstein he his in body and in mind, from his face. He didn't remember covering his face in the first place, but that doesn't matter. He doesn't remember a lot of things that happened to him. His mind is a fog, memories shrouded in viscous mist that he can't hope to see through. The man believes he can, though. He knows this, in the depths of his subconscious. In the depths of his subconscious he thinks he might have known the man.

Once.

Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away-

Because that's precisely what it is, and the Soldier can feel it more keenly than ever now, so it must be true. Some deep seated instinct has fought its way to the surface, and he knows that if he ever knew this man, it was a long, long time ago. In a world very different from the world he lives in now, and yet very much the same. The Soldier doesn't really feel the passage of time- perhaps through lack of memories of it. Or perhaps because the people with the power have made it so. Perhaps both. Only he knows that the time he might have shared with the man is gone. Maybe the man can't accept that. But the Soldier has learnt to.

He's not sure where these thoughts come from. He no longer fights them. He's not sure why he doesn't.

The man is falling.

The Soldier feels helpless. (He knows that is what it is, now. For some reason. For some unknown, unexplainable reason.)

And more than that. More than that, the Soldier feels-

Something. Sadness. He thinks. He's not sure. But he might. Hush. Don't tell the people with the power.

_So this is how he felt as I let go._

The thought comes unbidden, and the Soldier straightens up, as though physically affected by the thought. It is as though a voice has whispered to him, only it isn't his, the Soldier's, voice, it's another voice, the voice of a ghost of a man. The tone is calm, but the Soldier reads the underlying sense of loss the ghost must feel. But that's trivial, the tone is trivial, because what does it mean? What did the ghost let go of? Who is- who is "he"?

Is "he" the man?

The man has let go, the man is falling.

Has this happened to he, the Soldier, before?

He doesn't remember, but he doesn't think so, because he's too strong to fall now.

Has this happened to the hero's friend?

Maybe it has. Maybe that's who the ghost is. Maybe that's who the Soldier was. But maybe not. ("Does it matter?" asks the Soldier. "More than your life," says the long forgotten heart.)

The heart or the head? He's never made such a decision before. He's not sure he's ever made a decision before at all, because that was always their job. And even if he did, he's never had to choose, because he hasn't had a heart for as long as he can remember. And now the Soldier has to choose: the head or the heart? Old or new? Right or wrong? (He's not sure which is which.)

The head, a structure building, an architectural feat that holds the secrets of deception and the arts of all imaginable kinds of deaths. Or the heart, which reveals the building to be paper, to crumble in the slightest hint of breeze.

The head, broken, weary, confused. The heart, forgotten, emotional, impulsive.

The head, foggy. The heart, clear.

The choice is, as they say, clear. It frightens him. It repulses him. And yet this decision is better, he feels, than the alternative.

The man is falling.

The Winter Soldier chooses the heart.

He jumps.

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_A/N no.2: Hey you there. Yeah, the one reading this. I'll tell you a secret:_

_Reviews are cool._

_Go on._

_You know you want to. _


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